7 posts tagged “buddhism”
I read an interesting segment in the book I'm reading (thanks to Ben). It was discussing the difference between the ascetic (self-denying) and kenotic (self-emptying) paths of spirituality, and how Jesus ascribed to the later. The topic of Jesus's possibly active sexual life came up, and Bourgeault made the point that chastity and celibacy are two entirely different things.
Bourgeault gives us an example from a Buddhist story of two monks sworn to celibacy. Their vows have told them not even to *touch* a woman. They are journeying along and they find a woman waiting to cross a river, but who needs help across. One of the monks walks over to her, picks her up, carries her across the river, and sets her down on the other side. A while after the other monk looks at him, horrified and distressed, and asks, "How could you do that? Do you not feel unclean?"
To which the first monk replies, "Why should I? I picked her up and left her by the river. You are still carrying her."
It seems that chastity, then, is not about what you allow into your personal space. It's not an avoidance. It's not ascetic. It seems to be the frame of mind with which you let it enter. A detachment, a letting go, and at the same time a welcoming. This is the kenotic path.
The difference is in the frame of mind. Asceticism is something you can do outwardly with no inward change. Kenosis requires a completely different way of looking at the world. It is the inner change that drives the outer. There is no need to be confined by outer rules when your inward state is pure.
This is something I've come to notice with much of popular religion. It focuses so much on outward states and rarely looks inward. It seems that religion perhaps doesn't give us any credit in the inward department. Which perhaps makes sense given that much of it considers us to be completely depraved. And this is why so often religion feels disingenuous. It works on changing the outside, which has no lasting or deep effects on a person. It doesn't go down the core.
And really, I think that is what we are all seeking. Something that gets down to the core of our being.
"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen; room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure."
Pema Chodron
Seen elsewhere on Vox...had to borrow it. I've been flirting with buying one of Chodron's books for some time now.
Features bits and pieces on Ken Wilbur, Sam Harris, and others.
Also some really cool artwork is featured in the article. :)
Article published in the magazine for my former university. I wish I was still in school. :)
Class
participation: Lecturer Sarita Tamayo-Moraga, center, with students in
the St. Francis de Asís Chapel. Those practicing Buddhist meditation
take the floor, while those practicing Christian centering prayer use
the chairs.
Photo: Charles Barry
Look at religions in practice across the globe today, and too often the outcome of faith traditions at odds seems to be mayhem and terror. But juxtapose that with the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton: “Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.” Therein resides some hope that religious practice can in fact overcome violence.
Sarita Tamayo-Moraga and Philip “Boo” Riley, respectively lecturer and associate professor of religious studies, saw students’ frustrations with an increasingly violent world and answered it by creating an experimental course in Buddhist and Christian meditation. In addition to classroom study, the course offers techniques that give students a hands-on (or rather, mats-on) experience.
After teaching two spring courses in conjunction with SCU’s Local Religion Project, Tamayo-Moraga, along with a Zen guru and Catholic teacher, will give a final course this spring. Students read works by Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the best-known Buddhist monks in the West, as well as others. But it’s clear in this class, Tamayo-Moraga says, that students are walking away with a better understanding of these religious traditions through active engagement.
Does this mean students are trying to pray their way to world peace? Not exactly. While meditating, students reflect on real world issues both large and small: the war on terror, what it would be like to live in a war zone, acts of compassion and generosity, or conflict with a friend or family member. This being college, students’ coursework and participation in upcoming sporting events get attention, too.
In both Zen and Christian traditions, the outcome of this kind of contemplation is supposed to lead to action, transforming suffering in our world by creating more mindful, self-aware, and compassionate people—while issuing a call to action to help those in pain.
The
majority of students say they have left the class seeing their
contemplative life as a resource for making difficult decisions in a
non-reactive way, especially when it comes to making choices that might
be unpopular, such as supporting (or not supporting) the war in Iraq,
personal issues such as going against the wishes of a loved one—and
even centering themselves before taking tests come finals week.—EE
I wrote this out on a message board, and figured I'd save it here. It's inspired by and has references to the song I posted yesterday, which you can find here.
*****
Learning how to die.
Key word for me is learning. If we're learning how to die, doesn't that mean that we practice it? If that's the case, we're not *just* talking about physical death here.
So what are we talking about? Are there ways in which we die metaphorically in our day to day lives? One author I read described death not as you being ripped from the world, but as your world being ripped from you. If we take that as our definition, then many more situations apply. When you lose a loved one, part of your world is ripped from you forever. Or when you realize that the principles you'd based your life on were lies you'd told yourself, and you can't live with that world view anymore...it's like your world was ripped from you.
In short, we're talking about crisis. Existential suffering. And learning how to suffer and die and be in crisis...this is the most important lesson of all. Isn't that what the song seems to suggest?
Why?
Because we have a tendency to ignore and deny it. We have a tendency to say, "Please, don't talk about the end. Don't talk about how every living thing goes away."
It makes sense doesn't it? That we would avoid pain? That we would seek things like life and not crying, bending and not breaking?
But crisis is like a lion. If you run, you better run fast, because he will give chase and hunt you down like the weakest link in the herd. So we set up our lives as a race with no finish line. Just keep running, keep ahead of it.
But eventually you'll be caught. You really can't avoid it altogether. You can put it off, but when it gets you it will tear you to shreds. It's like Tetris game. You know the end is coming, but how far can you put it off?
But none of this is learning how to die...it's learning how to avoid dying. And "The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." (Ernest Becker)
So in learning how to avoid death, we learn how to avoid life as a side affect.
Therefore, when we look most deeply at how to live, we actually have to look at how to die. How not to run in the first place. How to actually get your hands dirty and deal with death/crisis. It's much easier to deal with a lion when it's sleeping and basking in the sun rather than when it's hungry and hunting you down.
But it's counter-intuitive to approach the lion rather than to run away. It goes against all common sense and worldly wisdom.
For Christians, doesn't this sound familiar? Not our way, but God's way? Not worldly wisdom, but the wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven? The two types of revenge... The infinite and all powerful Lord of Heaven and Earth choosing to suffer when he didn't have to? To show us to face death patiently and willingly and to let your love shine through the entire time? Did Jesus ever run away?
For Buddhists and Taoists, doesn't this sound familiar? To move willingly like water through every crisis that comes your way rather than to treat life like a bull and grab it by the horns? To recognize that life is suffering and that the only way out is to enter into that suffering?
It reminds me of a children's song that people sing at camp:
Goin' on a lion hunt.
Goin to catch a big one.
I'm not afraid.
Look, what's up ahead?
Cave!
Can't go over it.
Can't go under it.
Can't go around it.
Gotta go through it.
What it's like to go through it, and how to navigate...that's a whole other topic. That's why we all have to learn how to die.
What do you think?
Some more interesting thoughts from Alan Watts' Nature, Man, and Woman:
"Now the practical effect of a philosophy in which God and nature are incompatible is somewhat unexpected. For when the knowledge and love of God is considered to exclude other goals and other creatures, God is actually put on a par with his creatures. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of creatures can exclude one another only if they are of the same kind. One must choose between yellow and blue, as two of the kind color, but there is no need to choose between yellow and round, since what is round can also be yellow. If God is universal, the knowledge of God should include all other knowledge as the sense of sight includes all the differing objects of vision. But if the eye should attempt to see sight, it will turn in upon itself and see nothing."
This is a very interesting thought. I had never quite thought of it this way. He was discussing it in the context of sexual abstinence as a way of getting closer to God. He does think there are areas in which it is appropriate, but for the most part...no. More broadly, this is about tendency we Christians have to seperate the worldy from the holy. To think we can choose to be guided by God or by our worldly desires.
Essentially, the point he makes is that it makes no sense to seek God independent of the world. Not only that, but it is demeaning to God to think in this way. God is present in all things, right? So our knowledge of God comes from seeing those things. The knowledge of God is akin to sight. If we try to see sight, we see nothing. If we try to seek knowledge of God directly, we won't see God at all, and we even put God on the same level as the world. Instead, we look at the differing objects of vision and see objects. We look at the world and see God through it. For like Buddha said:
"There is no enlightenment outside of daily life."
For the next part, it is important to note Watts' definition of profane:
"The word 'profane,' for example, did not at first signify the blasphemous or irreligious, but an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the 'common' is not the crude but the communal--the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not merely the religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was--again in an ancient sense--extraordinary or outside the social order."
Now, we may continue:
"For the root of the confusion is that the Christian tradition of the West has lacked what we have called 'inwardness.' Its official position has always been profane, conventional, and exoteric without knowing it to be so. Thus it has confused the profane with the sacred, the relative with the absolute, the social sphere of law and order with the divine nature. The social order has therefore been enforced with sanctions which are too strong, and its laws have been made absolute imperatives. We have already seen this in the notion that the love of God and the love of nature can be considered alternatives, like mutually exclusive creatures and things. But when God, the Absolute, is thus dragged down into the realm of creatures and made to compete with them, the order of creatures, of society and convention, is blasted. For when the ear is singing, all other sounds are lost.
"This is why Christian officialdom is itself the cause of the very secularism and shallow relativism which it so much condemns. For the secular revolution of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and all that followed was a parody of the 'mystery' which the Church had neglected. This was the strictly inner or sacred doctrine that in God, in reality, all men are free and equal, or, to put it in another way, that in God there are no classes or distinctions, no respect of persons. For the initiate into this mystery has
put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all, and in all. [Colossians 3, 10-11.]
"A state Church, which is to say a profane Church, could not possibly admit or cherish such a doctrine, and thus when it was dragged out of neglect it became a pretext for revolution, and the Church could not claim it, saying, 'Come, this is nothing new. We have known it all the time and are now ready to explain it to you correctly.'
"Instead, the Church virtually disowned its inner meaning, retreated into an ever more rigid identification of God with law, and abandoned the position beyond good and evil and beyond distinctions to the secularists. But here it became the position below good and evil. Standards were not transcended but rejected, and equality in the sight of God became an assumption that all men are equally inferior. Freedom became mere individualism, and the classless society a dull uniformity. Art became monotonous eccentricity, and craft monotonous mass production. These are sweeping generalizations to which there have been happy exceptions, but the consistent trend of the so-called modern or progressive spirit has been doward an obliteration of social distinctions which is, in effect, a disorganization of society. For the organic is always differentiated, in function if not in worth."
Again, this is incredibly interesting. Watts continues to present things I've never thought about. This would make sense with much of what I've learned about tragic reversals. That is, when our best efforts at doing good unwittingly set in motion exactly that which we were trying to avoid.
But his point is stronger than this. It was because the Church was concerned with differentiating people that it could not stay true to itself. Politics and social order necessitate heirarchies and positions of power. Because the Church was a social institution, it organized itself, and therefore its theology, in the same way. Even though it professes that we are all equal, it could not fully embrace this thought as long as it was in control of ruling the people.
And this is exactly what caused people to rebel against it. But instead of admitting that they weren't doing a good job of exemplifying the all-inclusiveness and acceptance, they couldn't admit their faults. And so they had to justify them. The focus turned to laws, facts, and social conventions. It didn't just lose its depth, it rejected it out of pride and preservation of the status quo!
We can see this mirrored in today's Church. Not just in the fundamentalist views of God mainly as a lawgiver/enforcer. You can also see people hungering for more than what they are given at church. This has led two things to happen. The first is a new form of outspoken atheism. Not all atheism is included in this, of course. But there is a particular brand of atheism that looks directly at the fundamentalists and cries out. It longs for the equality and transcendant quality that it has come to believe Christianity and God are incompatible with.
There have also been movements from within the Church. Many people are looking deeper. There is an emphasis on reclaiming the religion. There has been an emphasis on a more personal God, a more personal religion. An emphasis on relationship with the Absolute, with God, rather than seeing him as a King reigning over his subjects. Things are changing.
People are wanting to unite, come together, shed differences. Unfortunately, we still don't get it. We saw huge distinctions, and so we swing heavily in the opposite direction. Where equality has become sameness. It's a formless blob, rather than an equality that incorporates that difference. We are unable, it seems, to deal with the tension between equality and disctinction (or maybe it's telling that we even call it a tension?).
But I think (I hope) even this is changing in some circles. Different *and* equal, individual *and* connected, a unity of many unique and different people. It's like when I realized, in teaching martial arts, that I didn't just love all my students, I loved *each* of them.
Alan Watts says it much more eloquently than I do, and I'm sure I misspoke somewhere in the preceding paragraphs. But it still stands that the one thing about God that we must fully embrace is his immanence and omniprensence. There is no exclusion from God. It doesn't make sense to think of God just as "good" and other things as "evil." God is beyond that. He is transcendant.
